Zeespotters
For this project, we deep dive into the fear of injections among young children who either either regular of long-term patients of the Sophia Children’s Hospital. With the use of immersive technology, the hospital aims for the reduction of fear and anxiety among children when coming in for examination and most importantly, injections.
The representatives of the hospital had asked us to come up with a fitting immersive tech concept to help children and their parents feel less anxious while attending medical examinations or staying over at the hospital, building trust between medics and patients.
Client
Sophia Children’s Hospital
Year
02/2024
Team:
Amy van Rijn
Sander van Ast
Emma de Haan
Nareyzha Isenia
Schoolproject
Immersive Technology
Research
First things first, we have to get to know our targetgroup, existing methods and how immersive technology affects our targetgroup. To gain a better understanding what and who we’re working with, I did my part by carrying out interviews and going to the hospital to observe how immersive tech influences the pain levels and fear of children.
The requirements we got for our concept were rather simple and gave us a lot of freedom:
The child has to be able to interact with the concept with only one arm
Parental involvement is a pro
The age requirement is 6-years old
It has to be fear reducing
Concept 1: Hide & Seek
The first concept we came up with was Hide & Seek, in which you play through a VR-headset, searching for a little elephant called Ollie, who is also the hospital’s and local football club’s mascot, so he is a well-known figure for children. Ollie will play with the child until it’s time for the injection and will digitally stay by the child’s side when found, until the injection is done. This way, they don’t have to feel alone and it redirects their focus, while still staying aware of their environment and what is happening so nothing catches them by surprise.
Concept 2: Zeespotters
“Zeespotters” was a concept we came up with during a three day design sprint event organized by our teachers for us to experience the many methods used to execute design sprinta, which are more fast paced than we are used to. Lucky for us, we learned to work with design sprints early on in our semester while working on this project, so our team of four went on to work with sprint and we came up with the concept “Zeespotters”. This concept uses a projector to display an animation of several sea animals, with the goal to capture them with your physical camera to earn gold. The gold can be spend in the shop or be saved to spend on a bigger prize when the child returns if they’re a regular patient.
The results
We ended up presenting “Zeespotters” as our definitive concept. The exposition was held in Innovation Centre Vonk, Rotterdam. While it was not only a succesful day, we also got to see other teams and their concepts and were able to learn from them as well see how they made use of immersive tech.
What i learned
This whole semester had a lot of ups and downs, but I feel like I had done a lot of work that ended up being very useful to get to the result we got to present to our stakeholders. It was a lot of fun, but I also learned more about the medical field and how digital design can be used during every stage of a medical procedure. It also made a lot of sense to take accessibility into account when designing such a concept. Targetgroups in the medical field all differ a lot from each other as not every individual can have the same physical abilities. That’s why it was important to not stray from our design guidelines and requirements. It was also very valuable to learn how designsprints work, see why it works and what other methods exist that can be used outside of sprints. It adds onto productivity and I feel like it sometimes forces you to think more outside the box in a positive way, instead of hanging onto the same ideas and doubts.